Stephen Reid @StephenReid@octodon.social

@Documentally It's local as in, everyone on your instance. It's not local as in, I'm not in Newcastle. ;)

@Idoubtit Depends on the references. I'm pretty superficial on both of those. Go deeper on other movies. Example: [sound of piano] "They hate this. I like to torture 'em."

@potentato the FOMO is real

@Idoubtit It was a long, loooong time ago. But as you can tell, made me think "Dog + bunny = bad". (I have 3 cats now. :) )

@Idoubtit Yeah, the dog in question was young and full of energy. We really believed he thought he was playing with something fluffy. Which he was. It just had fatal effects.

@Idoubtit Do the dog and bunny get on okay? I had a bunny, new dog killed it (and a guinea pig!!).

Wow, I just realized 'picking a federation' is the Mastodon equivalent of 'picking a server' in an MMO at launch. No-one wants to be on the low-pop server / instance. :grin:

@ottumon How come I can see this then (on another instance in fed timeline)? Is it because my instance is federated with mastodon.social or awoo.space?

The 'federated timeline' (still can't get over that name) is really interesting in practice. Long-term, if this takes off, won't work. But right now, kind of fascinating. Is there any other way (now or ever?) to see (almost) the whole of Twitter?

@potentato Yep. It's an issue. A weird one to crack, too. Especially as no-one is really in 'charge'. :D

Wondering if my (many) years dealing with MMOs and server instancing doesn't make me as worried about impersonation, etc etc here.

@potentato It'd be practically impossible to get your username on every instance, basically.

@potentato Yeah, I mean... it'd be easy to maliciously impersonate someone, at least superficially. Of course that happens on Twitter (see: all the Trump parody accounts with just one letter different in handle).

@potentato (1) yes, but their username would be @username@instance (2) don't think so, but you could create it... then again maybe there are export/import settings?

@potentato Every now and again Ello sends me an email out of the blue and I'm like "What is Ello again?"

@VinceintheBay The whole thing? No, a German. The 'federated' timeline is apparently a network of those on your instance, plus posts from the people that those people follow. So, I'm on a totally different instance to you. Someone 'here' (my instance) is following you, hence, you're in my federated timeline.

There's no central, overall timeline for all of Mastodon. Which is similar to Twitter I guess.

Thought: if the character limit is 500, then having the default setup be columns of text won't be user-friendly for long.

@VinceintheBay As I understand it every instance is unique. So you can't transfer, but you can sign up elsewhere.

@PolymerWitch Yeah, it'd be nice to see something work through people power instead of VC cash / IPO expectations. Just once?